Bernard Morin (; 3 March 1931 in Shanghai, China – 12 March 2018) was a French mathematician, specifically a topologist.

Early life and education

Morin lost his sight at the age of six due to

glaucoma Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that result in damage to the optic nerve (or retina) and cause vision loss. The most common type is open-angle (wide angle, chronic simple) glaucoma, in which the drainage angle for fluid within the eye rem ...

, but his

blindness Visual impairment, also known as vision impairment, is a medical definition primarily measured based on an individual's better eye visual acuity; in the absence of treatment such as correctable eyewear, assistive devices, and medical treatment� ...

did not prevent him from having a successful career in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...

Career

Morin was a member of the group that first exhibited an eversion of the sphere, i.e., a homotopy which starts with a sphere and ends with the same sphere but turned inside-out. He also discovered the

Morin surface The Morin surface is the half-way model of the sphere eversion discovered by Bernard Morin. It features fourfold rotational symmetry. If the original sphere to be everted has its outer surface colored green and its inner surface colored red, ...

, which is a half-way model for the sphere eversion, and used it to prove a lower bound on the number of steps needed to turn a sphere inside out. Morin discovered the first parametrization of

Boy's surface In geometry, Boy's surface is an immersion of the real projective plane in 3-dimensional space found by Werner Boy in 1901. He discovered it on assignment from David Hilbert to prove that the projective plane ''could not'' be immersed in 3-space ...

(earlier used as a half-way model), in 1978. His graduate student François Apéry, in 1986, discovered another parametrization of Boy's surface, which conforms to the general method for parametrizing

non-orientable In mathematics, orientability is a property of some topological spaces such as real vector spaces, Euclidean spaces, surfaces, and more generally manifolds that allows a consistent definition of "clockwise" and "counterclockwise". A space is ...

surfaces. Morin worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Most of his career, though, he spent at the University of Strasbourg.
::::''Morin's surface.''

References

George K. Francis & Bernard Morin (1980) "Arnold Shapiro's Eversion of the Sphere", Mathematical Intelligencer 2(4):200–3.

External links

Photos of Morin
with stereolithography models of sphere eversion.
The World of Blind Mathematicians

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems ...

file at the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

's website. {{DEFAULTSORT:Morin, Bernard 1931 births 2018 deaths French mathematicians French blind people Blind academics Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Topologists Academic staff of the University of Strasbourg Scientists from Shanghai Educators from Shanghai Scientists with disabilities

Early life and education

Career

See also

References

External links